Restoring Pride: The Lost Virtue of Our Age

by Richard Taylor

Rejecting the popular notion that everyone is equal and, therefore, ought to be equally proud, Richard Taylor defines pride as justified love of oneself. What justifies this self-love is personal excellence, that is, actual achievement of the kind that sets a proud person apart from the rest. Examples of the justifiably proud include Socrates, Ludwig van Beethoven, Malcolm X, Willa Cather, Pablo Picasso, and Amelia Earhart. However, pride is not a virtue reserved only for the famous. People unknown to the world often possess a greatness equal to that of the most renowned heroes. The truly proud are those who excel in some worthwhile area, be it literature, science, or good parenting. Their excellence is based on some ability or strength that they exploit to its fullest potential.

Restoring Pride is "elitist" in that it acknowledges that some people are better as human beings than others, and that they have made themselves so by perfecting their natural talents. The idea of the Sermon on the Mount, that the poor and the meek are blessed, is repudiated. Instead, Taylor embraces the classical Greek ideal of virtue as personal excellence without any suggestion that everyone is equal in worth.

The proud, setting the rules and standards for themselves, are apt to be looked on as unconventional. However, one invariable rule guides their behavior toward others: considerateness. The same egalitarian standard applies to their treatment under the law in a democratic society.

While concerned with the rules of manners, Restoring Pride is not a book of etiquette. Making no effort at "political correctness," it espouses, in a straightforward and jargon-free style, an ideal of life, exhorting us all to explore and cultivate the gifts within us, and thus to enjoy the fruits of genuine pride.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Self Help

232 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1995

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database named Richard Taylor.

Richard Taylor was an American philosopher known for his dry wit and Socratic approach, and an internationally-known beekeeper. He received his Ph.D. at Brown University, and taught principally there as well as at Columbia and the University of Rochester, from which he retired in 1985.

Reviews

[Alex Petkus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of the ideas of this book are interesting, but not very convincing if you take a moment to think of anything contrary to what Mr. Taylor is saying. Mr. Taylor uses many of Daniel Dennett's famously mocked "weak argument tricks" to move his text forward; so Mr. Taylor's foundation is weak. I thought of many things counter to his "argument" when "Only a fool would disagree"... or "surely..." etc....

The text is tedious, not because the diction is difficult, but because the same ideas are repeated ad nauseum. I honestly wonder if the publisher forced Richard Taylor to put in "filler text" because his initial text was "too short." The text carried on like a paper written by a kid who had nothing to say from about pg.45 until section 3 at page 205.

Section 3, on fulfillment and creativity, was interesting, maybe a total of 30 pages at the end of the book. Section 3, the first 45 pages of the book [the book starts on page 15, so really the first 30 pages] on "Stoic goodness," and pages 108-112 on the "function" of humans are the only parts worth reading. So really, only 64 pages are worth reading, and not because I agree with them, but because they are interesting. These lone pages bump the text from 1 star to 2 stars. If the book was only these 64 pages, the book might be worth 3 stars.

This book did improve my understanding of the Stoics, so I found some value here. However, Seneca was echoing through my mind through most of this text, telling me my time is my most precious commodity, do not waste it, making me wonder if I should just stop reading this text due to the tedious repeating of ideas that were wasting my time.

This text seems to take "a leap of faith" through Stoicism and Aristotle's texts, in the way that the Absurdist philosopher Albert Camus critisized existential thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre or Søren Kierkegaard with their idea of "having the freedom to define your meaning." It seems that the author finds more meaning or fulfillment in some actions than others, based on, what appears to be Stoic or ancient Western Philosophy metanarratives of "what is fulfilling, or meaningful, or satisfies eudaimonia."

This book's arguments lean heavily on Aristotle's discussion of the importance of function, specifically, how when compared to other animals, humans excel at thinking. This book oversimplifies the human condition, then draws conclusions from the oversimplification. My personal feeling is that this texts feels a bit "late" when other texts of the human condition, like Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus" or Gilles Deleuze's ideas of "flows" weigh in.

Overall, mildly interesting. For the main themes of this book, I believe Seneca did it better, and Seneca's "letters to a Stoic" are far less tedious while being much more to the point. Unfortunately, I have not yet read Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, but my guess is that your time would be better spent reading the original Stoics before you pick up this text.

[Maycon Dimas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A self-help book that will never make it as such because of its disregard for what is considered politically correct nowadays. It's not quite philosophy, but a good way to spread some ideas developed by thinkers. And it is quite well written as well.

[Kirti Upreti · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are three parts of this book.
Part 1 is an honest (somewhat brutally) description of the meaning of pride. The author has kept political correctness at one side and expressed his views, quite freely, on personal excellence and the higher worth of those who pursue it. His remarks on the people exhibiting a ‘plodding existence’ can be considering scathing. However, the ideas become a little repetitive.
Part 2 is about manners and how proud people should behave. This seemed completely pedantic and outdated considering today’s age of rapid communication of thoughts and ideas - leading to seamless and simultaneous assimilation of various sub-cultures into mainstream thereby transforming age-old norms.
Part 3 is about happiness and mostly derived from part 1. The difference between happiness and pleasure was a good read, though.
Apart from the above, the introduction is quite well written and naturally draws attention of any serious reader.

[Bulcha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't like writing reviews. I think they are conceited as it says more about the person reviewing the book than the actual book.

Nonetheless, I took a pill of self-righteousness this morning and shall give a review of this out-of-print book that should NOT be out of print.

This book talks about pride, but not in the sense of arrogance but in the sense of justified self-love. Having read countless books, completed therapy, and accepting my full capacities as a human being, I've come to love myself more. I thought I had foolish pride, but I still kept it, because it felt right. It felt justified. I knew this pride was integral for me in living a life that is honest and authentic. But I didn't want to parade it to the world, since I knew they would not understand it.

Then this book opened my eyes to the more accurate terms of pride and goodness. It made me realize that the self-love I have is justified. All the pagan philosophers of Ancient Greece spoke readily about the person that is good, not in the sense of being kind to others, but of having a great soul. And when people have a great soul, they have earned this justified self-love.

Because no matter what happens to them in this world, they still have that self-love. This book isn't here to blow smoke either. Richard Taylor gives every day and prominent examples to prove his point. My favorite example that he explains in the book is Malcolm X.

Malcolm X was a petty thief known as Malcolm Little. Then he went to jail, where he tended to himself through education, books, debate, and religion. Then when he came out of jail, he became Malcolm X as we know him. You have to understand, Malcolm X had justified self-love because no matter what happened in his life, he had himself. He transformed himself from a lost and vulgar soul to one of greatness. He carried this pride with him everywhere. From his debates, conflicts, and day-to-day living. Malcolm X even carried this pride, knowing that he would get killed.

Think about that!

Having enough justified self-love to be okay with the fact that you're going to get killed. You have to understand, Malcolm X knew that, whether he was alive or not, he had that justified self-love and respect. When you have that internal peace, the fear of death vanishes. Because it is only at this point you know you could not have lived any better. As Seneca once said, 'He has peace of mind who has lived his entire life every day.'

We live in a world where people live in the externals (wealth, status, etc) too much and don't tend to their internal world.

Why is it that today in the West we have so much, yet are the least happy?

Many people today do not have justified self-love and few will ever have it.

But that does not have to remain for you.

Resolve your internal conflicts, build that confidence, build it all! And through this, you will be able to transform yourself into someone you always knew you could be. This is how you find your justified self-love.

This book is worth reading, however, this book will be more meaningful if you first deal with any internal issues you have. Because without resolving that nagging anxiety, low-self esteem, etc, you will not fully grasp this book.

If you've read this far, then let this be the sign to resolve whatever inner conflicts you have, so that when it is time to take on the external world, it will be a lot easier than if you were always fighting yourself during the journey.

Farewell and let the rest of your life be the best times of your life!

[Ivan L. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though it is my earnest and sincere wish to extol this book's magnificence and proclaim its virtues, I simply cannot do so in good conscience. This is not, in notable contradistinction to many of its other reviewers, because I find the openly elitist views of its author, Richard Taylor, to be in any way outrageous or offensive to my sense of moral propriety, for I do not in the slightest measure find them to be so. Indeed, before I begin my critical comments on Restoring Pride, — and these comments, alas, will be considerable — I wish, with the following relatively brief statement, to place beyond all possibility of doubt or misunderstanding my views on the question of whether the overwhelming generality of men and women live lives of any significant worth: Sadly — often by choice — they do not.

Moreover, I am perfectly willing, without shame, to go considerably further than this. Since the weight of centuries and the inertia of custom have long ago turned egalitarianism into a hoary dogma; since, in the minds of far too many, mediocrity has been transmuted into a into a virtue; since even those who, in the privacy of their own souls, would pour scorn upon the belief that all people are equally good, discerning, moral, or talented nevertheless typically also believe, in a spirit of discretion, that it is monstrously improper to forthrightly voice such opinions, I regard a book like Talyor's to be a sorely needed rhetorical kick in the pants and would ordinarily stand ready to thank him for delivering it to the world. Indeed, I can only applaud — and I am supremely confident that any person of appreciable intelligence, sensitivity, or cultivation will stand at my side and applaud with me — when Taylor says things like the following:

We should face the fact that some people are better than others as human beings. Everyone knows that this is true, and while it may be good social policy to pretend otherwise, much is also lost. That is, some people are in fact wiser, more creative, more resourceful, and, in general, more competent in some or many of the ways that count in the world. The corollary of this is that some people are foolish, uncreative, unresourceful, and incompetent in some or even all of the ways that count in the world. (p. 15)

Human creative effort is exercised in many directions — poetry, music, graphic art, innovative business; the list is very long. Sometimes it attracts little attention, because the result does not immediately affect many lives, as in the case of many gifted teachers, parents, and so on; but creativity of this kind need be no less fulfilling. Sometimes, indeed, people find deep fulfillment in the humblest of projects, which still require their unique creative gifts even though they are of little interest to most people... They do not merely laboriously assemble something, but carry out some imaginative dream. Having done it, they can note, with deep satisfaction, what they have wrought, with the realization that, but for them, it would never have been done... These people, sometimes hardly known, nevertheless fulfill what is uniquely human in us all and thereby give their lives the only true meaning they can have. To do otherwise, to just passively receive pleasant sensations, to eat and drink and reproduce, to merely get through life with the minimum of pain and boredom, is to be no better than a dumb animal. (pp. 59-60)

What, then, remains to gripe about? Alas, quite a few things — and these are things of no little account. In any book, essay, or other work whose aim is to advance some sort of argument, the presence of a contradiction is invariably fatal, marring its worth so indelibly and so severely that only the most generous of efforts can find anything to salvage in it. Consider also the fact that Taylor was a professor of philosophy and should therefore be expected to perform even rather fine and subtle feats of reasoning with relative ease. It is with these things in mind that I undertake the following sketch of the principal argument of Restoring Pride.

Taylor defines pride as "the justified love of oneself." Through this fraught word has been used in senses quite antithetical to that one throughout its history — and Taylor readily acknowledges that this is so — there is no need to quibble over a word. I am happy to grant him his definition, for it is only in the subsequent steps of his argument that trouble arises.

If pride is "the justified love of oneself," what is the source of this justification? Taylor is unshakably adamant that this source lies not in one's possessions or wealth nor in the opinions of other people concerning one's character or accomplishments, for these things can all be either won or lost for reasons good or ill and can be bestowed or taken by unpredictable reversals of fortune. He is especially contemptuous of the suggestion — again, in my view, rightly so — that self-love can receive its justification from the approbation of the multitude. After all, if the vast masses consist, in the main, of those who do not even meaningfully recognize the obligation to cultivate their powers in worthwhile ways, whether those powers be gargantuan or modest, then of what account can their praise truly be? Furthermore, Taylor insists that the arrogant self-regard of a bloviating and shallow vulgarian must never be confused with true pride, which, in his series of chapters on manners, he argues often appears in rather quiet, unpretentious, and other-regarding vestments.

This is all very fine and noble, but it does not answer the question I posed: From where does the justification of one's self-love — the grounding of one's pride — arise? Taylor says repeatedly that the source of one's pride, the justification of one's self-love, arises from the kind of person who one is. Thus, he says:

Do not worry that you might cease to be noticed, or even that you might appear a fool in everyone's eyes but your own. The only judge whose opinion matters to you is you, but make sure that this judge is a demanding one. This judge, if a wise and proud one, does not care whether you are rich or poor, whether you are admired or ridiculed. The judge is concerned only with what you are as a person; with what you are capable of becoming as a person; and with whether, through your own creative power, you in fact become that person. (p. 72)

Alas, this reply fails to touch the true heart of my question. At best, it merely forces us to alter its wording; though, since the underlying principle of both versions of the query is the same, the alteration is an exceedingly superficial one. The question still at issue is: Why is the self-love of one sort of person justified but not that of another sort of person?

If Taylor wishes to preserve his insistence that neither the simple self-regard native to every man nor the approbation of vast swathes of others can, in themselves, justify self-love, then he must say that there is some sort of objective moral or normative standard, rooted in ultimate reality rather than in arbitrary convention or in the mere perception of reality, which can justify one's self-love if one conforms with it. In short, the thoughts on pride that Taylor expresses in his book can only assume the mantle of good sense if one grants that moral realism — the view that moral truths are part of the ultimate metaphysical fabric of reality, and are not mere expressions of subjective taste or of agreements reached for the sake of social peace — is true. However — and this renders his book fundamentally unserious to anyone who prizes clear and rigorous thinking — Taylor does not appear to believe that moral realism is true! He says in his preface, for example, that,

[t]he philosophers of classical antiquity were profoundly aware that there are two kinds of truth; namely, facts of nature, which are simply given, and facts of custom, which are human creations... Conflicts, sometimes bloody ones, similarly arise between nations when purely customary notions concerning equality, human right, and justice are treated as fixed truths. (pp. 11-12)

If our notions of morality and justice are all merely customary, then why are Taylor's ideas on the importance of such things as intelligence, creativity, and artistic refinement not also customary? Sadly, the good professor never deemed it worth his while to explain. Indeed, it appears never to have occurred to him that this is a question which a discerning mind might reasonably entertain — a matter all the more embarrassing for him since, if such things are only customary, it immediately follows that widespread acclaim can, in point of fact, be an acceptable source of pride. Indeed, if moral realism is false, then the question of whether, in Taylor's special sense of these terms, one can ever rightly feel proud immediately reduces to unintelligibility. On the assumption of moral anti-realism, the question of whether one is either right or wrong to hold himself in high regard simply never arises because there is nothing to be either right or wrong about.

Ineradicable a defect though this contradiction is with Taylor's book, it is, to my profoundest disappointment, not the only one. Gross misunderstandings about intellectual and cultural history, both with regard to classical antiquity and Christian civilization, also litter the book, and the fact that these misapprehensions often take the form of casual and cavalier remarks does not reduce Taylor's culpability for making them. In Taylor's recounting of matters, the ethical theories of the classical philosophers were profoundly individualistic, focused, to the nearly utter exclusion of all other considerations, on the cultivation of one's inner essence or spark — in short, of one's unique individuality. This conception, however, crashes headlong into the not inconsiderable difficulty that the concept of "the individual," as we understand it today, simply did not exist in the classical world.

To see this, one need only consider the reasons that Socrates, a man whom Taylor clearly admires and elevates to the status of a heroic sage, gave for drinking hemlock after his conviction by an Athenian court for corrupting the youth. Socrates rejected the exhortations of his friends to escape from prison because he viewed his exile from Athens as tantamount to the loss of his personhood. A man who did not belong to a polis was, in the Greek conception of things, no man at all, and was therefore, for that very reason, quite as good as dead. As Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges explains in his book, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome, this political and ethical philosophy, so peculiar from our modern point of view, had its ultimate origins in the very earliest stages of civilized and settled life. Archaic cities revolved around collections of families or clans, each of which were led by their respective paterfamilias, whose job it was to serve as the head priest of the family cult and tend to its hearth and gods. A person with no family gods was no person at all and could not be said to have any discernible identity. Large ancient cities, with Athens undeniably among them, grew out of the repeated consolidations of these clans and their respective sets of familial gods.

The individual, as we know him today, would be simply impossible without the cultural background bequeathed to us by Christianity. Through the joint Christian doctrines of the imago dei and the Incarnation, each individual man and woman, from the humblest slave to the most exalted emperor, morphed into an immeasurably precious creature. Taylor — with, it must be conceded, some justice — blames these Christian doctrines for our virtually all-pervasive belief in the moral necessity of equality, but these same doctrines had other descendants which were quite different from their brother, the most salient of these siblings being the fervent conviction, often held with unquenchable pathos today, that each individual contains within him some ineffable quintessence which neither his origins, nor his sex, nor his race, wealth, religion or nationality can ever possibly exhaust or encapsulate. Larry Siedentop tells this story with consummate skill in his book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism.

Since our modern notion of the individual would strike the ancient Greeks as both utterly foreign and entirely senseless, their conceptions of honor, or of what we would call personal worth, were, in due consequence, separated from our own by a correspondingly radical distance. The Homeric Greeks, for instance, had two terms, time and kleos, which most English translations rather inadequately render as "honor" and "glory," respectively. The former refers to the physical manifestations of esteem — gifts, awards, trophies, and so on — while the latter signifies one's public reputation — that which others say about one, whether in the form of songs, poems, or whispered rumors. Taylor vociferously rejects both of these notions as failing to comport with what he believes to be true pride, but these are the only such analogous notions that the ancient Greeks had. To them, honor, esteem, pride, personal worth, or what have you were all public things; if a man was not known to be worthy, then, to a Greek, he was not worthy. The more idiosyncratically individualistic notion of pride that Taylor finds so congenial simply did not exist anywhere in the classical world until, at the very earliest, the emergence of Late Stoicism, which was approximately contemporaneous with early Christianity.

Furthermore, as James Bowman shows in his excellent book, Honor: A History, Western conceptions of honor, personal worth, and appropriate or meritorious conduct were, in substantial degree, the final results of an unsteady synthesis between two very different — and, in the final analysis, incompatible — ideals: the one, an older one, which upheld bravery in battle for men and sexual chastity for women, and was irreducibly public; and the other, inseverably yoked to Christianity, which concerned one's personal probity, honesty, faithfulness, and inner intentions, and which may, in the end, be known to none but oneself and God. The dialectical tension between these two ideals was, Bowman explains, perhaps best exhibited in Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, in which Lancelot is both the greatest warrior among King Arthur's knights — and hence, most honorable in the older, public sense — and also the one who most shamefully and egregiously breaks his oath to his king by bedding the king's wife, making him entirely dishonorable according to the more individualistic Christian conception.

Through Bowman's masterfully limned historical portrait of Western honor culture, we see that Western notions of honor died, never to rise again, in the ghastly cataclysm of the First World War. However, before that death, they reached their zenith in the figure of the Victorian gentleman: a man who was scrupulously honest, hateful of dissimulation, kind and generous to the poor, impeccable in his gentility, insistent upon cleaving to the very highest physical, intellectual, and civic standards, loath to fight but ready to do so should the need arise, and, most of all, animated to the innermost core of his being by an unshakeable notion of fair play. Reading Taylor's own views on how the proud should conduct themselves, one unmistakably senses the shadow of this Victorian gentleman, though Taylor himself is quite unaware of its presence. He lambasts Christianity for allegedly having killed off the salutary classical notion of pride — which, of course, he sees it his solemn duty to attempt to revive — but, in truth, Taylor is far more the child of his Christian forebears than he understands.

For all I have said, I cannot conclude my remarks without pointing attention to something positive in Taylor's work. Without question, for all his faux pas, both logical and historical, he dispenses an admirable quantity of sound practical advice. Therefore, I will award the last word to Taylor himself:

No animal could ever create a poem, or music, nor could one ever form some plan for the future, some project never realized or even envisaged before, and then carry it out... Sometimes people become deeply involved in things for which there is no chance of their ever gaining fame. That does not matter. Fame and recognition are not the goals of creativity. You create something in order to bring about the realization of a dream, even though it may be of little interest to anyone but yourself...

All this points to a kind of imperative, minimally expressed as: Do something. Better expressed, it says: Create something. To do otherwise is simply to waste your precious life. Do not, as Epictetus expressed it, rest upon your dead kinship with the beasts. All they do is eat, sleep, reproduce, then die and decay. For a person to do no better than that is in effect to lapse into a mere animal nature.

All this is so obvious that it would hardly need saying if it were not that so many people — perhaps even most — do lapse into that dead kinship with the beasts and do not even see anything wrong with it. They go through life with hardly an original thought; gravitate from one pleasure or amusement to another; gain a livelihood doing what someone else has assigned; flee boredom as best they can; marry and beget children; and then, without having made the slightest difference of any unique significance, die and decay like any animal.

The point is, you can do better. You can set for yourself a goal that goes beyond all this, something which, but for you, would never come into being at all, and then you can achieve it... And the imperative is, simply, to find it and do it. The alternative is to be, in every significant sense, an animal. Thus you can join the ranks of the proud, or you can, at the end of your long life, look back at a great stretch of nothingness, at a succession of pleasures gained, perhaps some pains and misfortunes avoided, of days and years spent to no real purpose. And if that should turn out to have been your lot, then all that can be said is that you had your chance, and you blew it. If shame is the opposite of pride, then we can surely say that shame is the appropriate response to a life thus squandered. (pp. 114-116)

[Naaktgeboren · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book contains some good ideas, and is therefore worth a skim. It is however extremely tedious. The author appears unable to gauge the intelligence of his audience and constable appears to speaking down to them. Points that are easily grasped at the first reading are repeated ad nauseam.

But still, it contains some good, though not original thoughts, so this might be a good one to practice speed-reading on.

[Imp · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book defines pride, and then explains why it is a good thing through several examples. The book takes a through-and-through Greek cultural stance versus the Christian in the internal struggle of Western civilization.
Some good information in there about authenticity, especially regarding a dying friend or relative.
Explains the difference between proper, earned pride and unearned arrogance, although the author seems to have a personal vendetta against medical doctors.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

overly repetitive, the entire book could have been done in under 100 while still preserving the same ideas

[Edgar Orban · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great point but overly long

[Boo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this book was written by a 4channer before I looked up the author. The introduction was very simple and edgy, which nearly put me off reading the book. However, I'm glad I kept going.
There were a few misunderstandings by the author of certain philosophies and these misunderstandings weren't explored in depth. There was also a paragraph which stated a question and disregarded the question as unnecessary and stupid, which was completely out of line. Every question deserves to be explored, no matter how stupid. Especially since I, the reader, wanted to know the answer.

Other than this, the book did a good job of exploring what seems to be a high self-esteem in a manner that tried to clarify the symptoms and signs of a true and false pride. The ending was particularly good, as it explained the different of being content to that of being happy.

[Praveen Kumar Singhmar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes. We are born equals. But we're not built equals. Building oneself above the rest requires hard work, sacrifice, focus and commitment. You must pay the price to reach the top.

This book starts off really well but ends into a very typical generic message. Would've given 5 stars, had I not read it till the end.